Give everything to the sea
Agħti kollox lill-baħar.
Agħti kollox lill-baħar.
The Endless Queer
Dominic Guerrera
Colours retreat first
Then distance
Edges soften
Strange architectures grow slowly in the dark
Attached to rock, to each other, we form structures
that become homes
Our skeletons become our exteriors
A protection, a shield, a guard
Transforming through pain and contortion
We created shadows within our own curves
Disappearing within an opening, we swell, bruise, and buckle
Yes we move, not as one, but collectively
Often, we are tempted to decode or decipher artwork
As if it’s a code or complex language
Yet it is one of the most uniquely human things to exist
Guessing is cheap, feelings are rich
As there is no other art form that makes us feel connected to earth, they way that ceramics does. Literally we are working with Country, forged through nature’s chemistry, it feels so organic because it is
The ceramic vessel is our bodies, made up of the same thing our very own bodies evolved from, water and mud. But through the process of creation, we move our bodies to create and transform new bodies, we then extract the water compounding the vessel through another process, yet infuse it with story and structure.
Our vessels take series of blows throughout our lifetimes, bruises set in a site of impact - a sign of healing
Bruising is healing, healing is transformative, even the colour represents the progression of this, as purple becomes blue, blue to green than yellow, until the body heals, some would say return to, but really it continues out from the impact. It’s in this continuing you’ll find Sam Gold’s work. Their process is not bookend or a binary - but rather it’s ongoing. Coil by coil, layer by layer, pinching upon pinching
makes you ask, where is the first and last pinch?
This process of transformation is more transgressive in nature, as conforming to
accepted western social norms is not natural.
Therefore nature is queer. Sam’s work offers this pose/ process/ outcome
Every coil wraps to build a new life
Sam’s body pressures the clay into shape, a loving structure, knowing that learning this new clay body, is also a lesson in their own body. Both limitations and expansions, what to accept, reject and grow ourselves - this has always been the process of the Queer body. We know it is possible to change, break binaries and move out of categorisation. It’s a disruption of the status quo and one’s own body. Queerness is about the infinite possibilities of human sex, sexuality, gender and even love and all the non-versions of these things.
Queerness is like living under water. We can thrive in
deep waters. We know there is so much transforming yet to happen, to take us to new depths, to find new ways of life/ living. Where language is not possible because the structure of sound itself changes
Our Queer bodies are inherently rebellious, constantly rejecting the norms placed upon them. Shaking off the status quo, to form new understandings and languages. This is just as much a process, as it is a demand. Suck it up buttercup, we ain’t here to disapear, we are here to fuck your shit up. And good luck fighting us under pressure/ water?
Sam doesn’t celebrate the body, but rather investigates what the body endures, the need for survival and to become comfortable with the possibility that a body might emerge from change without wanting to return.
Here, in this collection, Sam lays bare the visceral nature of transformation. The courage it takes to say ‘fuck you, cause I’m doing this for me’
Fired into a new existence, bearing purple bruises
ready and waiting
to be revealed to the light
I truly believe that art is open for interpretation
I always connected with Sam’s work for a multitude of reasons
I remember one day, when I felt a *click within me
Something had shifted as I had come to understand Sam’s work in another way
I could see the connections between the vessels Sam had created and that of their own body, that of the bodies around them. I could start to see my own body present, the curves, the twisting and the shadows. The pinching became so much more visceral, I could feel each pinch within my body. Mimicking the pinches within the coils. This was not damage, this was structure and form. Creating uneven patterns across the face of the ceramics
I had transitioned from enjoying the works, to finally
understanding them in a different light.
Emerging from the darkness, they glistened and revealed their infinite nature.
Soft, Until It Burns
Sam Gold
The politics of touch sits at the centre of my practice because touch is never simply contact.
Touch is a negotiation of power. It determines how bodies meet, who is permitted closeness, who carries weight, who yields, and under what conditions one body may act upon another. Who may touch whom? Who is expected to tolerate touch? Which bodies are handled medically, professionally, sexually, violently, tenderly or without consent? Which bodies are regarded as fragile, dangerous, desirable, undesirable, dependent, excessive or in need of correction?
And crucially, who gets to determine the terms of contact?
These questions have never been separate from the methods of ceramics for me. Touch is naturally consequential in ceramics. Clay records every encounter. Pressure alters it. Support determines what it can hold. Too much force collapses it; too little leaves no impression. The material remembers the terms under which it was handled.
When I teach, I often ask students to become conscious of the power relationship already taking place between themselves and the material. The maker assumes the position of the dominant and clay the submissive: one body acts upon another. But clay complicates that hierarchy almost immediately. Push beyond what its moisture, structure or plasticity will allow and it resists, tears, slumps or collapses. Clay is honest above all. Clay becomes a mimetic mirror, returning information about the force being exerted upon it. What begins as domination becomes negotiation: how much pressure, where, for how long, when to support, when to release, when to intervene and when to listen.
Touch is never neutral. It can celebrate, discipline, console, labour, restrain, desire and heal. The physical gesture alone does not determine which one it becomes; meaning lives in the conditions of the encounter.
Agency matters.
So do pressure, responsiveness, dependence, consent and care.
The same hands that soothe can restrain.
The same pressure that supports can injure.
A yielding body can be read as vulnerable
when yielding may in fact be an extraordinary act of adaptation.
So do pressure, responsiveness, dependence, consent and care.
The same hands that soothe can restrain.
The same pressure that supports can injure.
A yielding body can be read as vulnerable
when yielding may in fact be an extraordinary act of adaptation.
Touch produces bodies because neither material nor person necessarily leaves an encounter exactly as they entered it.¹
I understand bodies similarly: not as sealed or autonomous things, but as forms continually shaped through contact, care, desire, dependence, resistance and adaptation. Through queer and disabled ways of understanding bodies, that relationship carries particular weight. Access to touch and proximity is socially organised (and shouldn’t be): some bodies and relationships are permitted closeness while others are pathologised, disciplined, made strange or pushed beyond reach.²
Dependency and support are not the opposites of autonomy here.
They are ways bodies live. To depend, adapt, support, resist or yield does not make a body less complete.
They are ways bodies live. To depend, adapt, support, resist or yield does not make a body less complete.
Touch also requires difference. Two bodies do not need to become alike in order to enter into relation. They can alter one another and remain distinct. This is the pattern through which I experience both material and bodily knowledge: touch becomes pressure; pressure establishes relation; relation reveals power; power demands adaptation; adaptation makes intimacy possible; and intimacy does not require the erasure of difference. A body meets another body. Water meets land. Clay meets pressure. Heat meets material.
These are not separate concerns in my work.
They are different ways of observing the same condition: nothing exists alone, and relation leaves evidence.
They are different ways of observing the same condition: nothing exists alone, and relation leaves evidence.
Growing up, bodily transformation was never abstract to me. It moved through the house like an atmosphere. Through swelling palms predicting rainfall. Through bruises changing colour over days. Through silences carrying more information than speech ever could. My mother, Ommi³, moved through the world like a witch of metamorphosis, not in fantasy, but in instinct. In survival. In the experience of disability and the violence of ableist structures that demand certain bodies remain legible, productive, contained. Around her, and around my family, there was always the feeling of living outside the frame of normativity; carrying inherited mythologies, refuge sought through old Mediterranean ways of knowing, weathered bloodlines, ways of sensing and surviving that sat beyond rational explanation.
Ommi would say:
Give everything to the sea / Agħti kollox lill-baħar.
Give everything to the sea / Agħti kollox lill-baħar.
In Maltese, the phrase carries a particular softness and surrender, as though grief, fear, shame, longing, even the body itself, can be returned to water to be transformed rather than destroyed. My siblings and I understood this less as advice and more as a method for living.
My matriarchal Maltese inheritance was less through fluency than atmosphere. Through saltwater superstitions, weathered bloodlines shaped by force, devotion, labour and survival. In my family, the sea was never simply a landscape. It was a threshold.
A witness, an archive, a carrier and home. It was the grotto for our offerings of fears, conditions and longings, but most of all a place to seek connection and celebration.
The sea could carry what the body no longer needed to hold alone.
The sea sits beneath much of my thinking; it is how the work arrives. Not only as ancestry or memory, but as a process. A body constantly reshaping itself through pressure, erosion, sediment, and movement. Water refuses permanence. It softens edges. Carries fragments. Dissolves boundaries. Returns things altered. I think clay behaves similarly. I knowI behave similarly. Absorbing, softening, collapsing, and most of all remembering. Water sustains clay like breath sustains us; the behaviour is distinguishably similar. I watch forms turn ghostly as they pass through stages of in-betweenness, water leaving like an exhale.
This part of the process has always been of deep interest. Not transformation as an end point, but transition itself.
Transformation suggests arrival. It privileges the before and after. Transition, however, remains open. It allows hesitation, recurrence, contradiction and multiplicity. I am less concerned with forms becoming something else than with remaining alive within continual negotiation. This is how clay behaves. It is
also how coastlines, weather systems, mineral formations and bodies behave.
My work begins, not as objects, but as relations.
I think the sculptures are less as objects, and more so, as hauntings. The best kind.
The studio increasingly feels less like a site of production and more like a commune of forces, an ecology of encounters. A place where forms gather through instinct, repetition, pressure, gravity, moisture, sound and touch. The works ask for surrender, for scratching, burrowing, softening.
My drive right now is to give more space
for the strange, more alive.
for the strange, more alive.
The hauntings are birthed rather than constructed. Not sinister, not demonic, but ghostly in the most tender sense. Haunted by bodily memory, inherited intuition, and the strangely beautiful emotional residue materials seem to carry. They arrive like offspring or entities asking gently to enter visibility. Sometimes I feel less like I am making sculptures and more like I am accompanying something into existence.
Clay teaches you things, particularly how to pay attention.
Clay understands this instinctively. It is never fixed. It tells you when it is ready. Much of ceramic practice is learning to recognise behaviours and conditions rather than impose outcomes. It has taught me patience, not as passive waiting, but as attentiveness. Relationships, whether with people or materials, deepen through time.
Heat reorganises clay entirely
The kiln becomes less a tool than an environment of eroticness, danger, and transition
A chamber where forms enter states of not-quite irreversible becoming
Surfaces blister, bend, harden, rupture
Something survives by changing completely
The kiln becomes less a tool than an environment of eroticness, danger, and transition
A chamber where forms enter states of not-quite irreversible becoming
Surfaces blister, bend, harden, rupture
Something survives by changing completely
This is where pressure becomes important to my method. Pressure is not automatically destructive. It can hold, shape, soothe, injure, excite, compress or transform. A bruise makes this visible particularly well: contact has occurred, pressure has been registered, colour emerges, and the body is already changing again. Injury and healing occupy the same surface.
I return to this kind of dark beauty throughout the work, not beauty as perfection, but beauty as evidence that something has been encountered.
Contact creates pressure. Pressure leaves evidence. Bodies and materials respond. Sometimes they yield, sometimes they resist, sometimes they rupture, repair or change direction.
This responsiveness is where I locate both material intelligence and bodily knowledge.
As a trans nonbinary person, I feel deeply connected to this condition of continual transition. Not as metaphor, but as lived knowledge. Transness, to me, has always felt otherworldly and magical, operating beyond the limits of normative understanding. Existing in multiplicity. Existing beyond singular definition. Existing in the constant negotiation between visibility and disappearance, pleasure and threat, softness and survival.
There is magic in that.
Not fantasy, nor performance. Real magic. It is the profound and at times euphoric, frightening act of becoming oneself against systems designed to stabilise, categorise, or erase multitudes. To live as a trans nonbinary being is to become fluent in transition. To understand that identity can behave like weather, water, heat bloom, corrosion, fracture. It shifts. It exceeds containment. It leaks beyond the edges built for it.
My transness has never felt like a departure from an
original self. One of the greatest realisations of my life was not becoming somebody new, but discovering language capable of holding who I had always been.
original self. One of the greatest realisations of my life was not becoming somebody new, but discovering language capable of holding who I had always been.
Recognition rather than reinvention.
I want to speak carefully about transness because so much of it escapes language entirely. For me, transness has never only been social or political, though it is deeply encountered by both. It is also experiential, bodily, spiritual. A way of sensing and thriving. A way of remaining visible within systems demanding coherence.
I think often about trans glory. Not spectacle, but the profound act of continuing to become. Of remaining soft, intuitive, fluid, and alive despite immense pressure toward containment. There is glory in multiplicity, in refusing fixedness. Glory in transformation without abandoning tenderness.
Transness is not the only place I recognise this knowledge. I see it in disability, care, ecology, geology, relationships and material behaviour. These are not equivalents, but each has taught me something about adaptation and relation. The world itself continually exceeds the categories we use to contain it. My queerness perhaps makes me particularly attentive to this, but it does not invent the condition.
This is why clay has always felt inherently trans to me. Not because it simply symbolises identity, but because it refuses fixedness. Its body is continually negotiating the conditions around it: atmosphere, pressure, water, chemistry and heat. Material and identity meet not through equivalence, but through shared ecologies of transition.
I often return to softness
Not because it opposes hardness, but because softness represents capacity
The capacity to absorb
To listen
To adapt
To remain permeable without disappearing
Not because it opposes hardness, but because softness represents capacity
The capacity to absorb
To listen
To adapt
To remain permeable without disappearing
Softness is an active force.
Forms carry residue. Bodies hold memory long after events have passed. Surfaces behave like skin, scar tissue, bruising, sediment, or mineral accretion. The sculptures seem to breathe between states. They hover somewhere between relic, body, offspring, apparition and biography.
In the making of Soft Until It Burns, I return to fault lines, invisible zones where pressure quietly accumulates beneath the earth until rupture becomes inevitable. In my queer and trans experiences, our worlds often live along similar psychic and social fault lines. Places where celebration, tension, vulnerability, danger, care and intimacy gather at once.
Yet fault lines are not only sites of destruction.
They are evidence of movement.
Records of the earth refusing stillness.
Ecologists describe the edge effect as the extraordinary diversity that emerges where environments meet. I understand bodies, identities and materials in the same way.
For me, the richest forms of knowledge emerge at thresholds, not exclusively inside certainty.
I want the works to hold that same sensibility. To feel swollen with pressure, luminous with allure, tender but menacing. Like something beautiful encountered in the dark that may or may not recognise you back.
Darkness or otherworldly here is not an aesthetic of despair. I am interested in the attraction of things that have understood consequences: the bruise, the fault line, the tenderness of something under pressure.
Beauty becomes more complex when it contains evidence of risk, survival, desire or change.
For this body of work, I have leaned into the knowledge gained through more than a decade of working with ceramics. I know how to ask more of clay bodies beyond the conditions they were designed for. I have joyfully dubbed this hand-blended clay body a thirsty stoneware with porcelain, resulting in my own peculiar Dirty Porcelain. It drinks deeply, carries its impurities proudly, is robust, keeps pace and has an appetite of its own.
Increasingly, I am a sculptor above all, one who just happened to become hypnotised by the black hole of juicy ceramic possibilities.
The expanded ceramic practice continues into the surfaces. Layered cold-glazing processes using automotive paints gather across the ceramic bodies like violet bruises and wet mineral skins. The colour palette moves through dark maroon and light violets, like dusk swallowing itself, like blood beneath skin.
Colour, for me, is never decorative. It is a tool for conveying context, arriving as a field of forces, a form of evocation. The violets are reminiscent of the bruises Ommi had.
Identity remains embedded throughout the work. Internal and external. The thumbprint. The drag mark. Pressure held permanently on the surface. Fingerprints, scratches, impressions, kaolin from the newspaper, paint built up from spraying, the physical insistence of my body and its gestures.
Behaviour is evidence.
I am less interested in what things are than in how they behave. A work leans because it negotiates the dominant force and gravity. Clay slumps because said force has acted upon it. A surface carries a mark because contact occurred. One sculpture alters another simply by being placed beside it. Behaviour reveals relationships long before verbal language does.
And those gestures have a history.
Ommi’s body was perhaps my first material education. Her feet and limbs would swell with the weather, sometimes predicting rainfall before it arrived; bruises appeared seemingly from nowhere, blooming and changing colour across her skin.
At ten, two years after the accident, I was trained to massage her body, pressing, pinching and working with my hands to bring relief.
Years later I recognised something familiar in the way I handle clay. The pinched marks I leave behind are not a technique I consciously invented in 2015.
My hands already knew the movement.
Care taught me something else that has become fundamental to the work: relation is not passive. To care for another body is to adjust, respond, negotiate, notice and be changed in return. This is why care has become a material methodology for me. It appears in pacing, repetition, repair, restraint and sustained attention rather than sentimentality.
Politics, then, is not an additional subject placed onto the work. It is already inside the method: who or what is permitted agency; how force is exercised; when I impose, when I respond; what a material can withstand; what care requires; what pressure leaves behind.
In making this body of work, I have thought a lot about the historical construction of the other, the ways certain bodies become framed as excessive, unknowable, dangerous, mythological.
Disabled, queer and trans people have long existed within those projections, associated with witchcraft, seduction and otherness.
I am interested in reclaiming some of that otherworldliness.
Not to romanticise it
but to recognise the imaginative and social intelligence that can emerge from existing outside normative structures.
There are entire forms of perception born from living there.
Deep listening.
Pattern recognition.
Embodied intuition.
Alternative systems of relation.
The ability to build selfhood from fragments.
To survive through becoming fluid.
Multiplicity is not confusion. It is strength.
Deep listening.
Pattern recognition.
Embodied intuition.
Alternative systems of relation.
The ability to build selfhood from fragments.
To survive through becoming fluid.
Multiplicity is not confusion. It is strength.
I won’t separate these ideas from the way I understand sculpture. I want the work to negotiate with architecture. The works lean, gather, interrupt, press and occasionally crawl beyond the wall, altering the way space is experienced. There needs to be a relational connection and harmony when I put compositions together, but another direction that disrupts is equally important.
I want to resist politeness and well-mannered forms.
The sculpture is not isolated from its surroundings. Architecture presses back. Gravity acts upon it. Light changes it. Other works alter its scale and behaviour. The viewer enters that field as another body. Sculpture becomes less an autonomous object than a relationship continually reorganising itself.
Sometimes I think the sculptures are like nervous systems speaking to one another
beneath consciousness
Speaking through fibre, sensation, atmosphere, and memory
Asking to be felt before they are understood.
I know that this is a legacy passed down by
Ommi to me, an inherited intelligence to sense the
body as primary language.
Ommi to me, an inherited intelligence to sense the
body as primary language.
During the making process I have been listening almost exclusively to ambient and operatic sound, submerged frequencies, distorted tenderness, electronic atmospheres capable of holding intimacy and threat simultaneously.
Aphex Twin pulses and the wheel purrs through the studio. The space becomes thick with resonance, friction, breath, repetition.
The hauntings recur throughout my practice not as symbols of absence but of persistence. Histories continue living within bodies long after events have passed. Materials carry memory. Landscapes carry memory. Memory is how stories arrive.
I titled the exhibition Soft, Until It Burns because transform-ation is never immediate. The title belongs equally to ceramics and lived experience. There is also a play of pleasure and pain, with hints of kink and queer culture. Pleasure and pain have never made sense to me as opposites. A bruise is evidence of injury and healing simultaneously. Heat comforts, transforms and destroys. Tenderness can carry risk. Devotion leaves a mark.
The work isn’t really about becoming, it’s about witnessing threshold states through transition.
I’m interested in transition more than a final transformation. In the messy middle. The haunted, swollen, luminous space where new forms are still gathering themselves into existence.
My life has continually brought me into relationships with people and communities finding ways of living and caring beyond prescribed structures. I cannot ignore systems that decide which bodies remain visible, productive, legible or valuable and for them to stand for something more expansive.
What ways of living become possible when we refuse the script of singularity?
My practice stands for ways of being that have been pushed to the edges: queer and disabled bodies, othered bodies, land, material knowledge, care and relationships that refuse the narrow terms they have been given. I believe there is profound knowledge in the ways we adapt, depend on one another, change shape and remain different without needing to become the same.
The sculptures don’t ask for permission or offer neat conclu-sions. They defend complexity, interdependence and the threshold. This is where I locate power: not in certainty or fixedness, but in our capacity to remain responsive, to resist containment, and to keep becoming in relation to one another.
Responsiveness has become one of the most important values within my practice.
It is an awareness of when to hold, when to yield, when to intervene and when to listen. Clay demands this of me. So do relationships. Increasingly, I understand responsiveness not simply as a material behaviour but as an ethical way of moving through the world.
I want Soft, Until It Burns to feel like entering a submerged landscape. A place where bodies blur into geology. Where surfaces sweat and are warm. Where pleasure and danger are impossible to separate. Where haunting becomes a form of care.
How softness survives not despite the burn, but through it.
Contact, pressure and change are therefore not a sequence with a clean ending. They loop through one another. What remains is evidence: a mark, a bruise, a memory, a surface, a new behaviour. This is perhaps what I mean when I speak about transition: not arrival at a final state, but the continual record of having been in relation.
The sea, clay, transness, geology, tenderness, pressure, ancestry and sculpture are not separate subjects within my practice. They are the landscapes my concepts travel through.
The work itself has always been about the intelligence of continual transition, making as acts of care and the politics of touch.
- Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Duke University Press, 2006).
- Ommi is Maltese for “my mother” — omm meaning “mother,” with the possessive suffix -i, “my.” Throughout this text, Ommi is what I call my mother and parent. My use of the word is also personal: a return to the Maltese language of my family and an ode to her. Those who know me well will already know her as Ommi. Choosing the name now is a small act of reclaiming and celebrating our language, ancestry and relationship.